Hi Gary. You've probably seen Bruce's note on music sound quality and I'd agree with him 100%. Any music compressed to MP3 will suffer some degradation in sound quality.
However, WAV files don't support MP3 tag id's and are a little unwieldy for today's portable players so if you want to take a lot of music with you or you just want a large collection of music on your hard drive with tags then MP3, encoded at a high bit rate, is probably not a bad compromise. I've read a lot of statistical analysis on frequency range and sound quality testing with various MP3 encoders and the Lame encoder is very highly rated in this field. 128kbps is generally regarded as alittle too low for good music quality but is obviously great because the file size is about as low as you would really want to go. I've always been surprised that the companies selling music downloads sell music at this bit rate to be honest. With regards to frequency range alone, I've seen many analysis reports that measure 256kbps as just about meeting the CD frequency range and so 320kbps is probably not going to yield much more in that respect but if you've got the disc space, why not. Even ripping a CD to WAV files will incur some degradation in quality but as Bruce pointed out, it's all about how high fidelity your player is and how good your hearing is that needs to be considered. Kevin ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Wood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "PC audio discussion list. " <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 11:30 PM Subject: Re: which is better format > Hi Kevin. I have my CDex set to 128 K. I thought that was supposed to be > CD quality. Maybe I'm not sure, but when I went into Soundforge, it classed > 128 K as CD quality. > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Kevin Lloyd" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: "PC audio discussion list. " <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 4:14 PM > Subject: Re: which is better format > > > > Hi Ron. > > > > This is a pretty loaded question as there are many factors and preferences > > to be taken into account. > > > > Personally, I rip using the Lame MP3 encoder at 320kbps. This gives me as > > close to CD quality as possible and I have plenty of hard disc so don't > have > > to worry about file sizes. > > > > I do have a portable player so if I need to load more music than it's > modest > > 10GB hard disc will take, I use CDEX to re-encode down to a level that I'm > > happy with, for example 192kbps. > > > > As I always keep the 320kbps masters which I've cleaned up and set volumes > > to be the same, there's no great loss in quality in re-encoding down to a > > lower bit rate to my portable player when required. > > > > Kevin > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "Ronald Glaser" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > To: "PC audio discussion list. " <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2004 7:17 PM > > Subject: which is better format > > > > > > what is the better format between > > windows media 9 loss less aug and mp3 or mp4 > > Ron > > _______________________________________________ > > PC-Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... > > http://www.pc-audio.org > > > > To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > PC-Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... > > http://www.pc-audio.org > > > > To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > PC-Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... > http://www.pc-audio.org > > To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ PC-Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... http://www.pc-audio.org To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
